In one of my post on energy balance we got response from a gasifier manufacturers M/s Infinite Energy P ltd who have pioneered biomass conversion and its application to bakery industry with processes like biomass gassification,biomass pyrolysis , biomass briquetting and biomass drying. I thought to post a article on this technology .

With increase in fuel prices the bakery manufacturers are now experimenting for low cost technology to save fuel cost . One such technology is gasification . Thermal gasification is a process that converts biomass usually consisting of fire wood into burnable gas or in other words to get producer gas . The producer gas can be piped from the gasifier to ovens which is burnt in specially designed burners . Wood can be replaced with biomass briquettes , rice husk , coconut shell or any other powdered biomass in the process.

Gasifier is basically a chemical reactor where reactions like pyrolysis , combustion and reduction takes place .It effectively replaces the expensive liquid gases with low cost wood without any change in operations .

Advantage of gasifier are that they use low cost fuel such as wood and ensures minimum energy loss . Dry gas generators improve overall thermal efficiency . Most of the operations have been automated except for the biomass feeding and ash disposal which are at present done manually . Other advantage of such gasifiers are its has low waste generation and zero liquid effluent.